The networked computing environment (e.g., cloud computing environment) is an enhancement to the predecessor grid environment, whereby multiple grids and other computation resources may be further enhanced by one or more additional abstraction layers (e.g., a cloud layer), thus making disparate devices appear to an end-consumer as a single pool of seamless resources. These resources may include such things as physical or logical computing engines, servers and devices, device memory, and storage devices, among others.
Providers in the networked computing environment often deliver services online via a remote server, which can be accessed via a web service and/or software, such as a web browser. Individual clients can run virtual machines (VMs) that utilize these services and store the data in the networked computing environment. This can allow a single physical server to host and/or run many VMs simultaneously.
However, the many VMs can sometimes provide challenges for the hardware on which they operate. For example, if a large number of VMs were simultaneously to utilize the hardware controller of a physical server that facilitates communications with the outside network, the controller might be overwhelmed. To remedy this problem, solutions have been developed. One such solution is software-defined networking (SDN). SDN virtualizes network communications so that one or more hardware devices can be utilized as a SDN gateway. In operation, these hardware devices are not utilized directly by individual VMs, which can allow multiple VMs to create a network connection through a single SDN gateway device.
To this extent, in many SDN solutions, the hardware gateway is a very important component for connecting the tenant network (e.g., the VMs in the remote server) to a traditional network (e.g., a wide area network, local area network, the Internet, etc.). To accomplish this, the hardware gateway will receive endpoint information that is pushed to it by the SDN controller. Upon receiving this information, the hardware gateway will generally build the data path to the hypervisor on which the virtual server is running (e.g., using a Virtual eXtensible Local Area Network (VXLAN) tunnel).